Looking back at my recent thinking about fonts as well as my general desire to poke and prod at the design of this site is making me realise that design overall something that I’m rather interested in. I mean, this is something that I’ve known to some degree before and I do already lurk on places like r/web_design so it feels somewhat obvious, but it is interesting to note how interested I actually am in making this experience and that of other projects as good as I personally can.

At the same time, I don’t really think I could do work as a designer, the idea of taking someone else’s wants and vision and turning that into a ready and useable product seems a foreign concept to me and not really something I would like to spend my days doing.

This desire to constantly iterate on the design of my personal projects was actually something of an early stumbling block when starting to test out WordPress, since I was quite used to the quick iteration cycle afforded by static site generators: since you have all the source locally and can consequently edit and then re-generate the site locally it was really easy to iterate on the design. With a CMS like WordPress in contrast, if I wanted to experiment with the design I had to set up a staging version of the site in order to do that; this problem is solved now though there is still some funkiness going on with how my staging and live environment are linked occasionally causing problems when testing things out.

At the same time, I do have experience of refining the designs of others, the current design of this website being a prime example. It’s based off of an old fansite kit provided by Blizzard, just updated a bit and brought up to a bit more modern standards with responsive elements added so that it works decently on mobile devices as well. There are some parts of it that I’m not quite sure about still, like the seemingly somewhat low contrast on the article pages themselves as well as some of the link colours, but overall it has served me well in the past year or so. So maybe working with design wouldn’t be that hopeless of a proposition after all, especially since it wouldn’t necessarily be implementing someone else’s vision but creating my own of how to use something.

Design is also overall a very interesting field, especially since it does not just compass how things look but how they work and how they are to use, these two last elements getting a lot more attention recently than they have in the past at least as far as the web is concerned. Simultaneously, there is also a lot of pretty designs going on that have poor usability and it always makes me want to improve those things and make them nicer to use; it’s also one of the main problems I tend to have when dabbling in other MMOs outside of World of Warcraft, the UI gets in the way. Honestly, one of the things I like the most about WoW, is being able to customise the UI so freely and bring the information that is important to me to the fore while blending the rest out. This also always makes it so difficult for me to understand when people hate on addons in WoW and think they are somehow cheating, all they are doing is displaying the information provided by the game in a more sensible manner—well, most of the time, and when that isn’t the case steps are generally taken to remedy that. It just seems silly to hate on a feature that is there to make the game better for the players.

Circling back to my initial point, I think I need to start poking a bit more on the site again to fix those small annoyances I have with it—hopefully with the side-effect of making it more readable in the process.

Looking back at my activities in recent times I find myself reaffirming my conclusion that I’m very bad at grunt work, the menial things that belong to jobs and tasks that are simply doing something, usually repetitive, that simply need to get done. The most recent example of this being when I was poking around with fonts, once I had concluded that I probably couldn’t achieve what I want and needed to start looking at potential alternatives that while still modern would at least provided the correct feel I kind of just stopped or at least progressed in fits and starts, letting myself get distracted by the smallest things so that I didn’t need to just keep doing the somewhat boring and manual task of merely scrolling through different font samples and looking for something that caught my eye.

It’s also something that features somewhat heavily in my writing about World of Warcraft I notice, any time I need to do the ancillary tasks related to getting my character ready for the primary content I want to do I tend to get frustrated and not remain overly motivated to continue to do so. I feel this approach in something that is primarily there for entertainment makes more sense than with other pursuits, but it could still be a useful skill to take with from there as it could prove quite important elsewhere.

I currently have a few of programming projects I have been meaning to start on for a while, and while I have quite a clear idea on where to go with them and almost exactly what to do I just can’t seem to get started. It feels like it’s the same problem in this case, I like the challenge of thinking something through but once it comes to the “easier” part of actually implementing it my will to do so starts to falter. I’m not sure what exactly can be done about this, and I tend to have bursts of motivation where these things go easier, but it feels like it’s something I’m currently struggling with more than perhaps is usual for me.

The amusing thing is, since I tend to like reading and learning things, I think I already am aware of the tools that could be useful in combating something like this yet for some reason I don’t seem to be implementing them. It’s a strange feeling, knowing exactly what and how to get something done yet at the same time being unable to do so.

I stumbled upon a discussion about “90s fonts” on HN recently and since this blog has a bit of a retro theme going on as well I was quite interested and decided to do some further digging. In order to test this on my site I disabled ClearType—the brand name if you will of Microsofts font antialiasing—and set the font used to Arial and wow, that felt like pretty much the perfect combination. It had the same blocky look seen in the screenshots of the article and it just kind of felt like it fit perfectly in here.

Unfortunately, there seems to be no sane way of achieving this. If it were available, font-smooth feels like the only reasonable way to get the correct look but not only is it very much non-standard, the Firefox variant of it is only enabled on OS X making it not really fit for purpose.

Now the approach the original article ended up with was creating a new font which mimicked the rendering of that font on older versions of Windows, and while this looked quite good to me there were some problems identified in the discussion which made me feel that wouldn’t be an appropriate approach for this site. Also, from what I could tell, they didn’t make their font-files available, so that also put a bit of a damper on that thought—to be fair, I didn’t look at the source, maybe there was a simple note there with a license.

Someone mentions bitmap fonts being usable, but I didn’t really find anything to support this statement and rather more comments stating the opposite as well as the original article.

Idea #2: Importing bitmap font files
We couldn’t make vector fonts look pixelated, but could we get around this by importing authentic 90s bitmap font files instead? We had a Windows 98 disk image with all of the system fonts including MS Serif: a riff on Times New Roman in the bitmap .FON format dating back to Windows 1.x. Unfortunately, we quickly found out that CSS @font-face doesn’t work with .FON files, and none of the web-based font conversion tools that we could find would convert them to the vector formats that are usable with @font-face.

Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

And even if they were useable there would be problems with scaling since bitmap fonts have one “native” size and anything else will not look all that good.

With all of this at hand, I concluded that there was no way for me to achieve this look in a way that would also be technically satisfying to myself so I then ended up spending some time hunting for other fonts which might satisfy my itch for a more retro look without necessarily being as authentic as this. I did find a style I find quite satisfying but in the end decided it’s probably better to leave well enough alone for now (there was also the slight matter of it being Mozilla’s core typeface, which made it feel somewhat wrong to use it). As far as I can tell the current fonts provide quite decent legibility and while they might not be retro still have a quite pleasant air about them making them nice to read.

So I like writing, should be somewhat obvious on account of me having decided to start a blog that you seem to be reading in the first place. Or at least, I like to see myself as someone who does like write, or I like the idea of being someone who writes—not a writer necessarily, since it feels like that comes with a different set of connotations that I’m not sure fit either me or my ideal.

However, what might also be obvious to an astute reader is that I’m not necessarily so dedicated to this craft since there is a tendency for my writing to be rather sporadic, coming and going as I have both an idea and inspiration to write about it. Once I sit myself down and start, I can generally get something satisfying but down—for me at least if not for the reader.

The process is enjoyable in these moments of inspiration but for whom do I then write, myself or you dear reader? Or merely for the act itself? Looking back at some of the things I have written before—like my writings about bosses we have killed or the like—I feel a certain uncertainty in those pieces, made for the act of making itself rather than with any more lofty goal, writing a guide that isn’t quite a guide yet not quite a recollection of the events nor a thorough analysis of the fight. These pieces seem to fall into that third category, made for the act of making itself.

They were also always the writing I felt least satisified by, trying to appease some nonexistent audience yet at the end serving no real purpose but to make something. But that act of making is in itself also valuable and while it may not serve the reader it does serve to satisfy the writer and her whims, and taking care of those is important as well. So in the end, those pieces were made to satisfy me yet they did not truly feel satisfying to me.

The other type of writing I have sometimes engaged in is simply trying to put my feelings on (virtual) paper in order to work through them, yet choosing to share them so that they may potentially serve as guidance to others or as memories to myself. It can be quite interesting to go back and read some of those pieces and look at the state of mind I was in at the time, especially now with the advantage of hindsight. I tend to gain a certain amount of resolve from those moments, since especially when looking back at times when things have felt hopeless in the moment those times have passed and have given time for better things. The best example of this, I think, are the posts during my transition from Alliance to Horde; those were somewhat difficult times where I was neither quite satisfied with the game nor my place at the time, yet both of those things ended up turning for the better and I made some cool new friends through the experience.

This process of writing things down can be quite freeing, giving another perspective on a matter and helping to process the feelings associated with it. I can remember this happening many times, having written about something and having it feel like a weight being lifted from my shoulders. Thinking about it, I think I need to start doing this around more things in my life though this place probably isn’t the right platform for that, having a somewhat constrained focus at least in my mind but who but I is to decide about what I write here? Maybe that is what I need the most in this time, to realize that my audience is me and not to write in order to appease others but to write to satisfy myself and get the things said that I want to say, not worrying too much about who they are for but me.

So that part of the expansion cycle is with us again, the endtimes. The raid is cleared, there is no new content on the horizon beside the next expansion and the general interest towards the current content is rapidly waning.

Raiding

We are still going somewhat strong and maintaining our weekly raids though we have those down to one per week now, but aside from that it’s mostly just the occasional mythic+ run along with the weekly alt-run that keeps us coming together and playing together.

The reduced activity has given me the opportunity to actually participate in the aforementioned alt-run and I’ve actually taken and geared my paladin well enough to be allowed to join in there which has been rather fun. My paladin I tend to play as a tank so getting to play another role again has been fun as well though surprisingly stressful even in a raid environment which I wasn’t expecting—usually I find raids more relaxing to tank than mythic+ but this somehow hasn’t quite been the case with Ny’alotha so far though I’m getting there with my comfort level.

This has also given me the opportunity to see how much of the raid I had been ignoring mechanically since these things didn’t really directly concern me though in at least one case it would have actually been useful to know. Three specific things come to mind: Shad’har tank mechanic; Ra-den phase two tank mechanic; N’Zoth Psychus phase.

Now the Shad’har tank mechanic is essentially don’t let your co-tank get two different types of debuffs which while quite simple as a mechanic and not something I need to concern myself with when not tanking is something that tripped me up the first time there.

The Psychus phase again is very relevant as a tank since I’m directly responsible for positioning Psychus correctly so that the debuff gets applied as well as ensuring the pool on the floor spawns correctly, and it’s also very good to know as a damage dealer so the correct tentacle is getting damaged it is largely irrelevant as a healer except for impacting how and where I move though even that is more down to environmental awareness than anything else.

The Ra-den tank mechanic however is something that might have been somewhat useful to know even as a healer though to be fair our tanks did call it and as such specific knowledge of how it works wasn’t important. But essentially, in phase two, Ra-den applies a debuff that does damage to the tank which scales with their current health at the time the debuff was applied. Knowing not to heal the tank before the debuff gets applied is of course important because of this, but as noted it got called anyway and I wasn’t focusing on healing the tanks in that phase so how and why it was important didn’t really register until way after progress was over.

All of this has however made me even more interested in maintaining more alts in Shadowlands if possible so that I have reason and opportunity to gain this insight earlier on in the content when it might actually prove relevant to progressing those bosses on mythic.

Shadowlands

Speaking of Shadowlands, we are slowly also getting more information to how the upcoming expansion will work and while my outlook remains perhaps more pessimistic than most I’m trying to keep an open mind.

The systems on the surface actually look quite promising, I’m looking forward to seeing interesting legendaries again and Thorgast could end up rather fun if implemented correctly especially considering my recent experience with another roguelike but I’m just worried they’ll suffer from the same problem that the Mage Tower in Legion and the Horrific Visions in Battle for Azeroth: being gated behind world quests/dailies. To me, this just adds a completely unecessary level of stress and frustration to the experience especially when playing multiple characters.

My other really big worry are the Covenants since even with the updated information of the initial switch being easy but returning being difficult I’m really worried about how Blizzard will manage to balance the abilities in a sensible manner as well as tying cosmetic rewards to gameplay since that will probably mean I won’t really have much of a choice in the matter. With luck those two things will align however I don’t feel that is overly likely. The optimal case is of course all of the abilities being close enough together that one can actually choose freely and this is more likely for the healers anyway than for damage dealers or tanks, but it is still something I’m looking at with more worry than excitement at the moment.

I think that actually sums up my general feeling toward Shadowlands: a mix of worry and excitement, though definitely more of the former; I’m looking forward to what’s to come but wary of getting overly excited.